Modern technology has produced a wide variety of electronic devices for alerting nurses to various difficulties encountered by patients. Among those devices are means responsive to bed wetting occurrences.
For instance, Wegryen in U.S. Pat. No. 3,245,068 discloses the concept of utilizing a paper sheet having a printed circuit thereon which can be placed beneath a patients body and connected to a suitable alarm means. When an electrolyte saturates the paper on which the circuit is printed, the alarm is activated.
Macias in U.S. Pat. No. 3,864,676 is exemplary of prior art systems which use an elongated sensor that is attached to the clothing of a patient and cause completion of an electarical circuit in the presence of an electrolyte.
The Seiger patent, U.S. Pat. No. 2,127,538 is exemplary of the prior art systems where a pad is provided with a plurality of electrical contacts and adapted to be placed under a patient. The electrical contacts are bridged by the presence of an electrolyte and cause the activation of alarm. Devices such as the Seiger device are fabricated so that they can be removed for cleaning.
All of the preceeding bed wetting alarms are limited to their use and application by their physical structure and require an excessive amount of fabrication detail which causes their cost to be high and their reliability low.